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Zhalavdi Geriyev in Itum‐Kali, Chechnya in September 2014. Image: Dominik Cagara. There are people who are much closer to
Zhalavdi Geriyev — we only kept in touch sporadically — but most of them won’t be able to speak up. I will, no matter the consequences,
because speaking up about the plight of journalists in the North Caucasus is
the only thing left to do.

In September this year, Geriyev, 23, who
worked as a journalist in the Russian republic of Chechnya, was sentenced to
three years in a penal colony on the absurd charge of drug possession, an
accusation which is commonly used to silence journalists in countries like
Russia or Azerbaijan.

Indeed, Memorial Human Rights Centre has
recognised Geriyev as a political prisoner, being certain that he suffered as a
result of his professional activity as a journalist.

On 16 April 2016, three armed men dragged him out of a bus
traveling to Grozny,
hit him on the head and drove him, with his hands tied, to a forest for
“questioning”. They repeatedly beat him and threatened they would kill him and
bury in the forest. When another car arrived, a man pulled a plastic bag
tightly over his head almost to the point of suffocation. He was forced to sign
a confession in a cemetery in Kurchaloy, his native village.

I first met Zhalavdi in 2014, when he was
21. He was participating in a training on peace and conflict studies which I
had organised. We discussed in depth the concept of structural violence: forms
of violence embedded in societal and institutional structures, which prevent
people from fulfilling their basic needs. Zhalavdi was a very attentive and
inquisitive participant, despite the fact that he had only recently started to
learn English. “I changed my mind about many things,” he told me after the
training. “Now I am aware of even more violence in Chechnya than I could notice
before.”

Chechen journalists are too terrified to report anything that doesn’t put the authorities in a good light. They fear not only for their own lives, but possible reprisals against their relatives

Zhalavdi invited me to stay at his
apartment in Grozny, where he confided that he worked undercover for Caucasian Knot, an online news outlet operating in the North
Caucasus. He never published under his real name; he signed his reports with a
generic nom de guerre, a common
Chechen name and surname. I know he went to rallies, conducted vox pops, and followed court cases. He
never criticised Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov explicitly, even in
private conversation.

Zhalavdi is a pious young man. He never
touched alcohol or drugs and often spoke up against doing so. Before he was
sentenced last month, he used his final word to swear on the Quran, retracting
his previous confession, that he was innocent and that he “wrote nothing
defamatory about the Chechen Republic or its authorities, wrote only the truth,
as the president [Kadyrov] requires from journalists.”

That didn’t help much. Zhalavdi is
currently serving his sentence in Chernokozovo, a notorious penal colony
located in the north of Chechnya, which earned its infamy during the second
Chechen war. Back then, the prison served as a part of the filtration camp
system, and it was known for torture and summary executions. Today, the
conditions in the colony are still so bad that three years ago the prisoners
organised a rebellion and a hunger strike.

Zhalavdi’s friend told me that at home
everybody is happy — at least he’s alive.

In the North Caucasus, everybody still
remembers the case of Timur Kuashev, a Circassian journalist
who cooperated with the Chechen journal Dosh
(“Word”). In August 2014, Kuashev was found dead in a suburb of Nalchik, in
Kabardino–Balkaria. He had been under surveillance, which was switched off
exactly around the time of his death. Investigators concluded that he died as a
result of acute coronary insufficiency, despite widely voiced claims that he
could have been poisoned. The perpetrators were never identified.

The worst feeling about these cases is
powerlessness. Anonline petition demanding an impartial trial for
Zhalavdi was launched (it now has almost 24,000 signatures), but I can’t
imagine that a state which doesn’t hesitate to murder its own citizens would
care.

With no systemic solution to address people’s grievances in the North Caucasus, people are going to increasingly channel their activism into radical ideologies

Zhalavdi’s trial was needed for the
Russian authorities to show that genuine civic activism and journalism won’t be
tolerated. These activities hit right at the heart of the system, which stands
strong with injustice, repression and control. I write Russian, because nothing
in the Chechen Republic, or any other place in Russia, happens without the
approval of the federal authorities.

Chechnya serves as an example for the
rest of the country. Ramzan Kadyrov has never “gone rogue”, which was often
claimed by experts at the time of Boris Nemtsov’s murder in February 2015.
Kadyrov is a direct product of Russia’s policy of intimidation against the
brightest in society, who would be able to bring about genuine grassroots-led
challenge to the system. That’s something Russian society needs now more than
ever.

This policy results in a situation where
Chechen journalists are too terrified to report anything that doesn’t put the
authorities in a good light. They fear not only for their own lives, but
possible reprisals against their relatives — a common weapon which is now used
to further intimidate the population and prevent people from speaking up
against the regime.

There is only so much a person can take.
With no systemic solution to address people’s grievances in the North Caucasus,
people are going to increasingly channel their activism into radical
ideologies, often with religious inspirations. In this year alone, almost 200
people fell victim to the armed conflict in the North Caucasus between the
authorities and Islamic rebels. The insurgency is fuelled by Russia’s
hard-line policy
in the region and the conflict has no end in sight.

Tellingly, Zhalavdi was accused by his
kidnappers of being a member of Islamic State, showing how, for the authorities
at least, there’s little between a journalist and a terrorist.

While strolling through the hollow
streets of Grozny in autumn 2014, Zhalavdi told me that, when he was a child,
he didn’t know that there were places in the world where there was no war. The
wars from his childhood continue, despite all the PR stunts trying to depict
Grozny as a phoenix rising from the ashes, the forefront of a new brand of
peacebuilding — the same kind Russia is deploying in Aleppo today.

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